Uncharted

About the Project

Uncharted is an immersive dance performance inspired by 5,000 years of knowledge-generation from the continent of Africa. Uncharted challenges current limitations on the concept and form of an archive, by weaving together historical anecdotes, language, and performance, with transcontinental unions of Black movement and sound. Uncharted reimagines archives as an experience of embodied collective memory in a virtual space.

Project Team

Ainslee Alem Robson

Ainslee Alem Robson is an award-winning Ethiopian-American director, writer and media artist, and current Sundance-NEH Fellow. Her interdisciplinary practice involves an amalgam of film, installation, archival material, VR, and emerging technologies in digital art. Re-orienting emerging technologies to operate in service to, and from positions of decoloniality and Black consciousness, she creates counterimaginings and emancipatory narratives speaking to the liminal space between Africa and its diaspora. Juxtaposing both emerging and analog media, Robson’s works present temporal manipulations that radiate fluidly, actively refusing linear definition.

Her commissions and collaborations have been exhibited by the New York Times, Vellum LA, Ars Electronica, MU, ZHdK, Forum des Images, and MoMA New York respectively. Most recently, Robson has been invited to the Curator’s Special Projects “Guests From the Future” at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Lesley Lokko. Robson's non-fiction writing has been published by eFlux and Guggenheim, Art Africa, Vogue Italia, and OffRamp academic journal. She has spoken at festivals such as SXSW and academic institutions such as Cornell, ZHdK, MIT, UCLA, and GSA in Johannesburg. She holds a BA in Philosophy and French from The College of Wooster and an MA in Fiction & Entertainment from SCI-Arc.

Kidus Hailesilassie

Kidus Hailesilassie is an architect and speculative world builder whose practice intersects architecture and contemporary visual art. He focuses on hybrid forms of transcontinental expressions that reimagine and shape counter-narratives of Black consciousness.

Kidus Hailesilassie is the creator of the Culture Archive, a multidimensional platform for research, think tanks, and dialogues that recenter the writing tapestry from African and diasporic writing systems. His recent project, the Uncharted Installation, an extension of the Culture Archive, won 2023 PitchBLACK by Black Public Media. Uncharted challenges the current limitations of the concept and form of an archive by weaving together language and performance, incorporating transcontinental unions of Black movement and improvisation.

Through his creative process, which encompasses physical installation design, production design, video installation, interactive environments, and still imagery, Kidus's focal point is the concept of embodied architectural narratives. This approach underscores the ability of architecture to tell stories and convey meanings through its form, materials and spatial arrangements.

Since 2013, Kidus has collaborated with international artists and institutions such as Studio Other Spaces, Studio Olafur Eliasson, Forum des Images, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (IFA), and Contemporary And (C&). He is a former M.A. EDGE fellow at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, SCI-Arc.